How Bad Does It Have to Get?
The Monopoly Supplier In Our Community
Monopoly Suppliers are regularly brought into our nation’s communities on the municipal level, the City level and the County level. Contracts to be the main provider or the only provide can bring big benefits or big problems to the citizens who live there. This article highlights a few new ideas for elected or appointed community leaders and planners, and decision makers who bring these suppliers to us all.
Time Warner Cable bought my local cable provider, Adelphia a few months ago. Adelphia was already a poorly managed company with terrible customer service but steady fee increases for their services nonetheless. Time Warner set new levels of dissatisfaction for me recently as I tried to cancel my cable and Internet service when I moved.
JEEZUS! After a cryptic journey through voice mail hell I waited on hold for forty minutes to talk to a human. Finally, a customer service person (or customer service avoidance person) got on the line. I don’t know what state or country they were in, but it wasn’t San Diego where I am. Even though it was January 2nd, and they were closed on New Years day, the agent tried to tell me that they would have to charge me for the entire month of January, even though I disconnected their service and moved out already. I half expected this kind of diabolical treatment from a supplier who obviously could care less about me, since they are the officially designated cable service in my community, and there is no other choice for customers.
Lucky for me, I was moving to another cable service provider area, so I was ready to fight. I tried to get a supervisor on the phone and yelled at him quite a bit until he agreed to ask some mysterious person and put me on hold. I was thankful that it didn’t take much longer than five more minutes when he came back on the phone and reluctantly agreed to have the termination dated from the 1st of January.
The next shoe dropped when he informed me that I would have to be there when the service technician picked up the equipment, (the digital cable box and internet router) which would be sometime in the next few days at a non-specific time. “That sounds practical” I thought, I’ll just wait around my apartment for few days even though I‘ve moved out, “Did I mention that I was going to be several thousand miles away in a few days?” I reasoned with the Time Warner Cable rep.
“How about I leave the equipment with the apartment office, since they will have to let the technician in to the gated community anyway?”. “NO, our policy is that you have to sign for the release of the equipment to him”, he said. Your only other choice is to drive to our service office and drop off the equipment. I definitely wasn’t going to do that.
No matter how I reasoned with him, or how I insisted that I trusted their company and that the apartment office handled all kinds of transactions for their residents, the Time Warner Cable Rep would not budge. “Whose equipment is it anyway?” I finally asked him. “It’s ours” he said. “Then your equipment will be in the apartment office waiting for you to pick it up at your convenience”. A lot of yelling transpired after that and then he hung up on me. Sending a truck around to pick up your own equipment is not a lot to ask when the same truck originally dropped it off to begin with, I thought.
I don’t know of they will come and pick it up or charge me $350 for their gear. We’ll just have to wait and see. I’m not paying them a cent.
Where does this company get off treating me like this? How did a business with these kinds of practices ever get into my community to begin with? How can they expect to stay in business? Simply put, they are the monopoly supplier. They don’t have to adapt their product or service to the customer’s convenience, because customers don’t have a choice.
I don’t know who actually makes agreements with particular cities or municipalities to select one cable service over another, but the voice of the customer seems to be missing when these decisions are made.
Monopoly suppliers probably promise the world when they’ve been awarded the contract as the sole or exclusive supplier, and perhaps local cities only see the potential revenues they receive from granting access to their customers. But where is the customer when these decisions are made? Besides cable TV companies, other monopoly suppliers come to mind including various telephone services, box stores such as Home Depot or Wal-Mart, Your local utility companies, Supermarket and even the Post Office.
Monopoly deals are usually not made in the public eye, are executed too quickly and without full disclosure of the details and their implications to the customer and the community. On the other hand, people are just too busy to follow this kind of localized decision-making anyway or simply don’t care until it affects them directly. Then it’s usually too late.
Local politicians, developers and bureaucrats would do better to advocate for and protect the rights and interests of their customers by following a few of the simple guidelines I’ve included here:
Have local representation- Even though our local politicians are supposed to be representatives of the public they serve; it’s always a good idea to get the citizen-customer involved. Maybe set up a committee with a diverse group of folks who are representative samples of the population.
Survey the population to find out what they might think about the impact of a box store or about the service they expect from a cable TV operator, before the decision is made to put one in. You might be surprised what you learn. Maybe the citizens don’t want what you think they do. Red light cameras were certainly not an idea that citizens came up with.
Benchmark return policy, fees and charges, number of parking spots etc.. The devil is in the details and if a supplier wants access to the customer base they should be willing to make some concessions. The bureaucrats or decision makers involved can negotiate for just about anything within reason, before they let a particular business into the community. What about guaranteeing a certain number of supermarket cashiers or bank tellers 24/7? What about waiving ATM Fees in a designated municipality? What about guaranteeing that a particular business will pay the prevailing wage? There will be suppliers who are willing to do this if there is a real customer base.
Annual customer satisfaction and service reviews. Independent service and satisfaction community surveys with penalties or higher license fees for those who fall short of a certain standard or whose service decreases over time, paid for by the supplier of course. When a city council approves a major store chain, supermarket or other business into its community it is having an impact on that community.
Advocating for a higher quality supplier means setting an expectation that the supplier will perform. Independent surveys of customer satisfaction follow the famous adage: ‘trust but verify’. If a community can stop smoking on it’s beaches it can make box stores banks and supermarkets guarantee to staff their stores with enough check-out clerks.
Recognize community satisfaction performance and penalize low performance. Perhaps certain community fees can be waived or awards given to the businesses that genuinely provide excellent customer satisfaction. Perhaps fines and negative PR are the penalties for those who can’t maintain a decent level of customer service. Maybe particular businesses should be asked to leave if they refuse to step up to the customer satisfaction plate. Let the community set it’s own standard levels. Maybe Time-Warner would have paid a stiff fine for it’s extremely poor levels of customer satisfaction with me, or maybe after survey from the community was calculated, their contract would automatically be up for re-compete.
Keep merchant and supplier satisfaction data in an accessible database with running trends and totals. It’s relatively for a city of any size to put up an Internet based satisfaction study to gather continuous customer feedback on all of it’s retail businesses. A running list of the best and worst community suppliers, and why—will put hard metrics and rigorous measurement to those generalized gut feelings of dissatisfaction.
No Rhetoric, just results. Instead of trusting marketing slogans and lip service or the word of the suppliers themselves, communities should keep steady attention on really providing customer satisfaction to it’s citizens. This should really be the responsibility of the supplier, but more often that we’d like, profit at any cost seems to be the only motivation.
The fact that the community gets into adversarial relationships between it’s citizen-customers and the suppliers who are supposed to be serving them is a poor state of affairs in the supplier organization. Simply put, if you’re going to be in business, the community should have some recourse if the supplier provides lousy service.
Monopoly suppliers destroy the customer-supplier relationship we all hope for and expect. Forty minutes of voice mail hell and tells me you don’t care about me or my business, or you’d hire enough people to deal with your own customer base. If there were any competition, I would have been on the phone with another supplier right away. When the financial realities of more than one supplier operating profitably in a given market make a single choice of supplier the only option, they should be continuously reviewed for quality with strong contractual guarantees in writing.
The suppliers that are invited into our communities affect the character of the community and the quality of life there. Think about how many times a week you go to the supermarket. How many times a week would you like to step in to a welcoming service oriented environment, have a great relationship with your local grocery personnel, and check out smoothly?
Think about how you are continually affected when there are no service personnel to help you or you have to wait too long in line. Calculate how many times this happens over the course of a year and you might be surprised at the real impact on your quality of life.
Access to our markets and our customer populations are one of the few assets we have left in America. Let’s not give them away for nothing.
Bart Allen Berry
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